


Veterans' Association

by Kalya_Lee



Category: Captain America (Movies), Doctor Who (2005), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Grief, Guilt/regret, Healing, Post-Winter Soldier, pre-Rose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-20
Updated: 2015-08-19
Packaged: 2018-04-16 05:37:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4613253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kalya_Lee/pseuds/Kalya_Lee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“It wasn’t my war,” he says, “but I fought anyway. What does that make me?”</p>
<p>Melody Pond, the Oncoming Storm, and the Winter Soldier - after the wars.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Much thanks to Dara, my incredible beta. :)

He wakes to the sound of a safety clicking off.

There’s a woman sitting cross-legged on the warehouse floor. Wild hair, high heels, cradling a gun of a type he’s never seen before. Unusual; his weapons training had been extensive and kept scrupulously up-to-date. Perhaps he’s just forgotten. Sort of thing keeps happening to him.

He tenses, unmoving. Watches. The woman smirks, smug and self-assured. Her shoulders are loose. Relaxed. Shoes like that, concrete floor – she should have woken him long before this.

_Threat_ , says a voice in his head. It’s always saying this. This time it seems justified. _Threat threat threat_.

She sits about three feet away – not a large distance. He crosses it in one lunge, pivots, pins her against the wall he’d been sleeping beside. Dirty blankets curling around her heels; her smile, unchanging; his metal arm closing around her neck. He’d ditched his guns in the second week when he’d run out of ammo, but he still has the arm. He hated it. Hates it. It’s useful.

The woman laughs. Also unusual. It’s not nervous, or mocking – he knows those sounds, those are familiar. This is not. Loud and bright, a little breathy from the pressure of his arm against her throat. High, light, filled with some unnameable emotion.

_Amusement_ , says the voice in his head. The word tastes foreign in his mind. _Honesty_.

He startles, flinches back.

“Now,” says the woman, voice thick with that – _amusement_.  “You’re not going to kill me, are you? Only my husband would be ever so upset, he’d sulk for centuries. _Men_ , honestly. So needy.”

He stares at her, for a moment, considering. No fear in her eyes, most unusual of all. No fear and no anger. It stirs something in him, deep down.

“No,” he says, deciding. He lowers his arm.

“Good,” the woman says, smiling. Not a smirk, this time. Warmer. “I’m sorry, I probably should have introduced myself first. Professor River Song, archaeologist.”

She extends a hand, reaching into the narrow space between them. Her left, though by the gait and the gun he can tell she’s right-handed. A test, perhaps.

He hesitates. Slips his left hand into hers, slowly, gingerly, the metal glinting in the dust-streaked light. Her grip is strong but gentle, firm and feather-light. Comforting. Strange.

“Of course,” she says, whispers, with a wink, “that’s just my day job. By night I’m a superhero.”

She peers at him, waiting. He says nothing. After a moment she squeezes his fingers, just once, not hard enough to hurt. Friendly; even stranger. He takes a moment to wonder what she is waiting for.

“It’s Barnes, isn’t it?” and the thought, sudden realization – _of course, my name_ – flashes, in a voice that is his and not-his, the closing of this ritual bursting like a lost memory. One of many, then. “Bucky Barnes?”

The name – _my name_ – sparks something, like pain. More forgotten things, more things lost. Or buried, deep down. He doesn’t know. He draws back with a shudder, hard and violent, and he knows she sees. Doesn’t care. She doesn’t say anything. Waits some more.

This time it comes, what he wants to say. Pushes itself out of him in words he doesn’t completely understand, speech like blood, vital. Dripping out.

“No,” he says, “not anymore,” and he sinks down on his heels from saying it, the exhaustion of it, finding the words. “He called me that, the Captain, but I’m not. And I can’t – that person. I can’t. Find him anywhere,” and as he says this his eyes close, tight, and he opens them. Finds the woman – Professor River Song, archaeologist – crouched down beside him. Her smile is gone, her eyes still warm. He clenches his fists in his lap.

“What is it, then?” she asks, low and serious. A voice, another voice inside his head, pipes up with answers. _Asset_ , it says, _Winter Soldier. Sergeant Barnes._ He tries; can’t say them. They feel wrong.

He presses his lips together, shakes his head. No. He doesn’t know.

“Sometimes,” says Professor Song, softly, slowly, careful, “people give you names, to make you who they want you to be. Sometimes they do it to control you. Sometimes they just love you. It doesn’t matter, because sometimes they don’t know who you _are_. ”

There’s something in her voice, some strange authority. Something honest. He looks up at her, meets her eyes.

“Sometimes,” she says, “we choose something else.”

“What if,” he says, voice rusty, unsteady, “what if I don’t know?”

The smile comes back, like her very eyes are laughing. He wonders what it must be like, to have that much – joy.

“Then you choose someone you want to be,” she says, like it’s simple. “Worked for me.”

He nods. Thinks.

“James,” he says, after a moment. It feels – better. Like it might fit. Professor Song nods back, acknowledgement, and her smile widens, and he realizes distantly that all this time she’s been smiling at him.

“Well, James,” she says, settling back down on the ground, crossing her legs. She looks comfortable. He tries it – not bad. “What exactly are you doing here?”

She’s looking up, around. He follows her gaze. The warehouse is filthy, dusty, long-abandoned, grime coating the windows, crates growing cobwebs and metal boxes rusting in corners. He’s been sleeping here for the past three nights. Hiding, he’d thought, but then again, she’d found him.

“I don’t know,” says – James, honestly. Strange and stranger. He’ll get used to it, he decides.

The Professor nods, again. Her look is so gentle. “I did that too,” she says, and James can feel it, the touch. She’s drawing kinship between them, like she wants it. Unfathomable – amazing, and he lets her. He’s shocked to find he wants to. “Hiding, for no reason. Not even very well. You’d have found me in a second.”   

He looks her up and down, assesses. “Not likely,” he says, and feels unexpectedly light inside when she laughs.

“Yes, well,” says the Professor, tipping her head. Modesty. So many new-remembered things, today. Then her eyes darken a shade, and her tone goes serious, and she places her palm over the back of his flesh hand, his right. Grounding him to her. Not, he realizes, a capture, just a request. _Listen to me_.

“James,” she says, steady, steady, drawing him in, “they took you from yourself, didn’t they. Stole you away and made you something else. Made you theirs.” And he is shaking. He is shaking.

“And you don’t even remember it,” she says, and her voice has dropped low, storyteller low. She’s weaving a tale, he can feel it, and it’s again unfamiliar. Because tale-tellers construct lies like stories, but this feels real. True. The weight of understanding behind it. “You can’t tell what they’ve taken and you don’t even remember them taking it. And it feels so wrong, to you, because you’ve lost so much, you deserve to know how you lost it.”

The shaking, it feels like a purge. Like – what is that – _withdrawal_. Cleansing. It hurts.

He grabs for her then, blindly, snatching up her hand and holding it tight enough to hurt. He’s done this before, to disarm, watch bones break. It’s not like that now, he just wants – something to hold, an anchor. So he doesn’t shake apart.

“You know,” he says, gasps, really. The surprise in his voice. “You _know_.”

The Professor nods, presses another hand over the space where they are joined, cradling him like she’d cradled that gun. There is – tenderness. Kindness. It lights a fire deep within his skin.

“Yes,” she says, and does not point out that he is crying.

They sit like this, silent, till the shaking stops. The Professor lets him hold her, and James does not, somehow, want to let go.

“It wasn’t my war,” he says, then stops, freezes. He’d not meant to say this. The words feel unfamiliar, disconnected – not things he’d thought, no words he’d strung together. But then again, he realizes, it is familiar. It’s the cry that’s been trying to burst out of him since the day he fell.

“It wasn’t my war,” he says, “but I fought anyway. What does that make me?”

He wants an answer, he realizes, as he asks. This is the question he wants answered.

“You tell me,” says the Professor, and he thinks for less than a second.

“A soldier,” he says, and the word is familiar, but it tastes bitter on his tongue. “A weapon. Or a – a victim.” And maybe what he really wanted was a different answer.

The Professor cocks her head, like she’s curious. Pondering. Wondering. “I suppose,” she says, after a moment. “But personally I’m partial to _survivor_.”

_Survivor_. The word ticks over in his mind, struggles its way through. _Survivor_. Mired in so many connotations, so much muddy memory, but it is – strong. Not guilty. Not an accusation or pity. Better. Still –

“Not enough,” he says, and that surprises him, too, that he means it.

“Of course not,” says the Professor, shrugging. “Enough is what comes after.”

“For you?” he asks, and she smiles at him again, that knowing smile. _Yes_. “How?”

“I found those who loved me,” she says, slowly, like she’s tasting the words. Finding them sweet, by the looks of it. “Those who forgave me. After a while, I suppose I started to forgive myself. You know, James,” she says, and locks eyes with him with all the power of a command and none of the cruelty, “there are those out there who love you. You might not believe they exist, or that you deserve it, but they do. And you will. Or you don’t have to, because it doesn’t work that way.”

He bites his lip, considers this. “It’s just Steve,” he says, like a sigh. “I tried to kill him. He won’t want me.”

The Professor grins, then, open and laughing with some secret delight. “Oh,” she says, “you’d be surprised the sort of things they’ll forgive.”

She stands, then. Dusts off her leggings, ready to leave. He rises, too. For some reason he doesn’t want her to go.

There is one more question. This one is familiar. The words sour in his mouth, oddly, but he has to ask. “Do you have a mission for me?”

The look on the Professor’s face is – hard to understand. Pinched and soft, at the same time. _Sympathy_. _Fondness_. He’ll have to think about this, later.

“Yes,” she says. “Find them, the ones who love you. Let them forgive you.” She hands him two yellow envelopes, like the ones he used to get, when he was – before. For a moment the fear cuts through him, knife-like, but she settles her fingers over his, so gentle, and she wouldn’t ask him to do that, she _wouldn’t_. “And one other thing, for a friend of mine. You’ll know it when you see him.”

He nods. “I owe you.”

“Oh,” she says, breezily, “I stopped counting those things a long time ago. When one is married to a man whose idea of a good date is getting shot at on a ship falling into the sun it’s more trouble than it’s worth, keeping track. Let’s just say I’m paying off an old debt, for a friend.”

She turns to go. Smiles, once more, into the growing dusk, nods at the packets in his hands. “In your own time, Mister Barnes.”

_In your own time_. Odd time frame for a mission, but not unprecedented. Later, when he thinks about it, he finds what had felt wrong about the phrase, what had felt missing. _In your own time, Soldier_ , says the voice in his head. She had never called him that, not once.

She is gone before he can think to thank her.

***

He rips into the packets that night, hands trembling with the thought of finding headshots and addresses, kill orders. He’d do it, he knows. He owes her. But it would be – unpleasant. Wrong.

The first packet holds a stack of photographs – a tall man, sharp eyes and shaved head, in a leather jacket. A blue box. And a dossier, but no location, no kill order, just a story of a man and his war.

The second packet is full of information about Steve. Speculation on his current whereabouts. Last known location, recorded a month ago. CCTV stills from two weeks past. Useful, but not very. She was good, that Professor, good enough to find him. He could have handed him more – she could have handed him over.

_In your own time_ , she’d said, given him outdated intel. Ceding the search to him. The decision to him. Not her mission, not anymore. His.

“Mine,” he whispers, feeling the shape of that word, so much tied to it, so much stranger than all the others. Less like a forgotten memory and more like a lost dream. Through the grimy windows he can see the moon. It shines, high and full, glints off his arm until it becomes something almost beautiful.

“Mine,” he says, louder, stronger, cradling his arm to his chest. “Mine,” and he means this mission, and this part of himself, and he means everything.

“Mine,” he shouts into the silver moonlight, a foreign language, the refrain of a stolen song. _Maybe,_ he thinks _, if I sing it enough I can bring it back._


	2. Chapter 2

On the day he arrives James is braiding Natasha’s hair.

They’re curled up on the floor of the lounge. Natasha’s painting her nails with a silvery polish and filing them with a whetstone. It’s clearly delicate work, and James parts the red strands he’s gotten his fingers tangled in with expert care, doing his best not to distract her. It’s quiet, pleasant, almost surreally so. An improbable moment, suspended in time.

Tony, of course, takes the opportunity to ruin it.

“Avengers!” he cries, tearing into the room wild-eyed and excited. “We have a code blue!”

“What the hell’s a code blue?” asks James, cocking an eyebrow. Natasha doesn’t even look up, turns her attention to her right thumbnail. Tony plants his hands on his hips, classic intimidation technique which works on exactly nobody.

“It’s the code I made up on the spot,” says Tony, like this should be obvious, “because a giant blue phone box has crashed into our roof. And I use the term ‘crashed’ in the loosest possible sense, because it basically appeared out of nowhere, smoking.”

 _Blue box_. James’ hands still. “You’d better go tell Cap,” he says, carefully. “There’s protocol for this, you know, Stark.”

“Yeah, mostly protocol written by me,” says Tony, “and it basically reads ‘Tony gets first dibs on any new and exciting tech that crash-lands on the building’. Which includes this, by the way, so _dibs_.”

James finishes off the braid and hands it off to Natasha. She smiles at him, absently.

“No dibs,” he says, standing up. “I’ll handle this one. I’ve got standing orders.”

Tony’s eyes seem to bug out of his head. Even further, if that’s possible.

“Standing _orders_?” he demands, horrified. “From _whom_? May I remind you who built the building you are now staying in – rent free, I might add – and signs your paychecks and, and keeps you in ammunition and arms – _literally_? I’ll give you a clue. His name rhymes with Stoney Shark.”

Natasha snorts. “An accurate description if I ever heard one.”

“You made me a new metal arm and pay me to shoot people,” James says, eyes narrowing. “That doesn’t mean you own me. The last guy who tried that got shot in the head.”

Tony crosses his arms and does an impeccable impersonation of an incensed toddler. “By Nick Fury,” he points out, and you can almost hear the pout. “Who is not only dead but also banned from all my properties indefinitely. And _Steve_ isn’t going to shoot me.”

“He might,” Natasha says, conversationally, as she ties off the braid. “I would.”

“Ganging up on me!” groans Tony, throwing his hands in the air. “State-of-the-art titanium prosthetics, weapons-grade iron-ore nail polish and a house with a security system capable of keeping out the, count them, _thousands_ of people who’ve put a bounty on our heads high enough to buy a small European nation, and this is how you repay me. See if I make any new toys for Russian assassins from now on.”

James rolls his eyes and heads for the door to the roof. “I’m from Brooklyn,” he says, and yanks the door open, “and I said thank you, didn’t I?”

The door snicks shut. Tony huffs in frustration.

“Cheer up, Stark,” says Natasha, filing her pinky nail. “Do you know how to do a French twist?”

***

The box, as expected, is blue, British, and bigger on the inside. It is situations like this that make James so particular about comprehensive pre-mission briefings.

“Doctor?” he tries, slipping through the half-opened door. That had been one of the first things that’d struck him, opening that yellow envelope for the first time. The man without a name, title only – the promise making up the persona. It’d been one of the things that had made him connect, made him start to care.

The box’s front room is a mess – grime-coated roundels on the walls smoking like shell-holes, coral-like struts crumbling, sparks flying off the central column – and James walks gingerly, picks his way over the grating and broken glass. He’d long ago learned how to walk through a warzone. No Doctor, though, and he slips, silently, into a corridor.

“No one here by that name,” says a voice, cracked and hoarse, from the first room on the left. “And I hope you’re not here for a ride. No vacancy.”

“Nah,” says James, stuffing his hands in his pockets. “Got nowhere to be.”

He rounds the corner, takes the room in. It’s a kitchen, or something like it, with high counters covered in a smoky quartz-like crystal, a shiny new induction stove abutting an open hearth complete with Dutch oven, a coffeemaker composed mostly of blown glass and copper piping. Dark-wood cabinets, a central table covered in undulating mosaic tile. A gleaming button-covered door that looks like some sort of oven. A man with a shaved head and too-bright blue eyes, slouched against the wall beside the kettle.

He’s staring. James meets his eyes, and he flicks his gaze away.

“Gotta be kinda lonely, though,” James says, leaning against a counter with a carefully-calculated slouch, “rattling about in here, all by yourself.”

The man blinks. His lips twitch. “You get used to it.”

They stand like this for a while, watching each other. There’s a light radiating off the walls, a jarringly warm glow, and it pools into the silence between them until it fills.

“Hey,” says the man, after a moment, eyes fixed on the edge of James’ left sleeve. “I know you, don’t I. You’re the Winter Soldier.”

“James Barnes,” says James. It’d taken him months, this, learning to say the name without choking on it. Now the words roll off his tongue, smooth as water.

The man quirks an eyebrow –  “Oh! You kept the name,” – and James smiles. It’s a small smile, wry but triumphant. He’d learned it about the same time he started being able to wear short sleeves.

“I took it back.”

“Yeah?” The man’s expression darkens, eyes clouding over. “It’s not that easy,” and there’s a roughness in it, a buried rusty-blade pain.

James shrugs, crosses his arms. “I never said it was easy.”

And there it is, the thread between them, stretched thin and shining as spider-silk. Strong, fine, handle-with-care. Almost invisible but there, there. James can feel it, tangling over his fingers, and it’s the same rush as the press on a rifle’s trigger, just as delicate, just as dangerous.

“Is that a Brooklyn accent?” asks the man, breaking the silence. “I thought you were Russian.”

James smirks. “Common mistake.”

“Well, you’re a legendary assassin covered in anachronistic tech,” the man says, and scowls. “Excuse me if I got a little distracted.”

It’s petulant, childlike, a tight strained sort of humour running under. The man shifts, pushes away from the wall, stands straighter. Lets the tiredness seem to seep from his bones. But James knows this – posture like a mask, or an alibi – and he can see where the fatigue has run and hidden in his eyes.

“I must be everything you despise,” says James, low.

The man laughs. A sharp, hurting bark. “Maybe,” he allows, “a long time ago. Now there’s just me.”

More quiet. James likes quiet. He’d had a sharp tongue when he was – _younger_ , he remembers, but there was a long stretch of time full of things too awful to speak, and every word felt like a knife-wound, a betrayal. Since then he’s learned to find solace in the silences.  

But this man, this quiet man, shifting in the dark corners of this glowing-bright room – he needs words, James can tell. It’s something in the set of his shoulders, the twist of his mouth. His shifting gaze, his restless hands. James watches him, gropes for something to say.

“Do you want tea?” he asks, finally. The man laughs again – more huff than bark this time. It’s something.

“You’re standing in my kitchen and now you want to make me tea?”

James shrugs. “I served with your people in the war. You English folk have a fixation.”

The reaction is immediate, or maybe James has just gotten good at looking. _Wrong_ – the man stiffens, shoulders freezing. “You don’t know the first thing about my people,” and his eyes cloud over, even further, till they’re the blue of a stormy sky.

“Well,” James says. “I make shitty tea anyway.”

He gets a glare for that. Or not – a sharp-eyed stare, no heat but keen enough to slice straight to bone. It’s a cold look, quelling, but almost clumsy. Unintentional. Raw. Misery like freezing, inevitable once the water’s cold enough. James understands freezing. He understands.

The man takes a step towards him, crosses his arms. “Okay, enough games, now,”  he says, gaze flat, lips thin. “What are you doing here? Who sent you?”

“You landed on my roof.”

The man snorts. “That’s not an answer.”

James straightens. Unfolds his arms, lays his hands flat on the counter. _Honesty_. Not as foreign to this man, perhaps, as it had been to him, but just as startling, just as strange.

“You’re my mission,” says James, and it really is that simple. “From an old friend.”

The man quirks an eyebrow. “Of yours?”

“Of yours,” James says, “I think,” and doesn’t miss the way the man curls in on himself as he says it, shoulders rounding, arms pressing tighter against his chest. Hope flaring, quickly quashed – it’s a small movement, but too familiar to ignore.

“All my friends are dead,” says the man, acid, guarded.

James smiles, to cut it. “New friend, then.”

This one earns another laugh, barked again, rougher than the last. Harsher. Like it’s scraped out of him, this bitterness, welling in all his dark places until it becomes too much, till it’s ripped out and thrown into the world like a purge, a weeping.

James knows this, too. Admires it, even. Bitterness is not something to admire, but it fills the empty places like bile, like blood. Life signs. He knows bitterness; feels it even now, sometimes, welling inside him some mornings when he wakes with the dawn and can’t meet his own eyes. It’s a horrible thing, a horrible painful broken thing, but it’s also proof – of life, like bleeding is proof of the presence of lifeblood, like jagged edges are proof of something still hoping hard enough to cut back.

“Hard to believe?” asks James, to give this man something to fight.

There’s a moment, then a tiny shift in the man’s shoulders, and the fires flare and crackle in his eyes. “Don’t say it like you know anything about it,” he snaps, anger bright and hot as a collapsing star. “You don’t. How could you?”

There.

There’s the thread, again, shining between them. James grabs at it and holds it, gives it a tug. He could draw it in, he knows, if he could only figure out how.

“You don’t remember it,” he starts, prodding at the places where the thread is thickest, all the still-barbed edges of his own. He keeps his voice low, steady, sure – a flicker in the man’s eyes and he knows he can be sure. “Everything you did. And you feel like you should because it’s – awful, isn’t it? And it’s like you’re getting off easy, not remembering. Like you should feel it. Think about it, every second. All that blood on your hands, you ought to _remember_.”

The man’s gone rigid. His hands shake. James wants to touch, but he feels the burn of a stare on his forehead and locks onto that instead. An anchor. It had been so long, before, since anyone had touched him with anything but hatred. He wonders, now, how long it’s been since someone had been able to meet this man’s eyes.

“It wasn’t your war,” says James, “but you fought anyway.”

The man shuts his eyes, tight. His voice cracks. “It was always my war.”

“Yes,” James says, after a moment, “I suppose it was.”

The moment hangs between them, pressed thin by the weight of every other silent thing they are saying. James can feel the thread, pulled taut but unbreaking. The man opens his eyes.

“You say it like it’s a regret,” he says, “Like something I can apologize for, get some therapy, sorted. But it’s not. It’s everything. All the silence, the screaming. It’s – everything.”

“Everything you are,” says James. “You think I don’t understand that.”

A smile, or something like it. It’s tight, crooked, a rictus. “You can’t. _You_ – “ and a finger, pointed accusingly, right into James’ chest, a little to the left, over his heart, “took it back.”

James shrugs, again. “It’s an ongoing effort.”

It’s funny, maybe. There’s something missing, though, needs to be said.

“It’s not who you are,” he says, suddenly, realizing. “The name. It’s – a promise.”

“Yeah,” with a sardonic sort-of grin, “and I broke it.”

“So you make it again,” says James, like it’s simple. And it is, really. It was. It’d also been the hardest thing he’d ever done, but then these things have never been mutually exclusive.

The man takes a step closer, leaning forward, peering. His hands spread, palms up, unconsciously, grasping. Searching for something.

“Why are you here?” he asks, finally, and his voice now is nothing but tired. “Really.”

An empty warehouse, grimy windows, grubby blankets, cold. A concrete floor. Moonlight on metal, silver on silver, and how that had felt – empty, and lost, and then a sense he could not name because he’d lost the word for hope.

“Because someone was, when I needed it,” says James. “Because you’re not the only one who got ripped up by the wars. Because there are too many of us, I guess,” and here he chuckles, smile sharp like a knife’s edge but shining as a wane moon. “And I guess that means we gotta stick together.”

The man’s breath hitches. “Sure feels like it,” he says. “Like there’s no one.”

There’s a flicker across his face, though; a flash of gold, its own kind of shine. Almost there, almost there. “Sure feels like that’s bullshit to me.”            

The man stops, and then he scowls, and he stomps over to the table and pulls out a chair and sits down, hard. There’s a fury in it, rolling off him in waves, a caged-animal sort of weeping frustration and the sores from all the wounds that will take more than this to heal. There’s hatred in it, too, daggers pointed inward and all the stains from all his sins flushing his face red. But something has lifted, or maybe something has landed, or maybe something has opened – a song long forgotten, a promise, a name. A gold glow like rebirth, claiming it. Bringing it back.

“Bet your coffee’s lousy, too,” says the Doctor, and James grins.

“Let’s find out.”


End file.
